Natural and man-made disasters are more common than ever. In healthcare, their impact is far more serious than facility damage and standard business continuity and extends to the safety of the patients, employees and surrounding community. Yet most hospital emergency managers use a word processor to create emergency management plans and training materials and store them in cumbersome three-ring binders. This makes updating the plan, running drills and responding to an emergency difficult, time-intensive and often ineffective. In addition to the broader safety issues, these tasks are strictly mandated and monitored by regulatory agencies such as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and poor performance has direct impact on Medicare reimbursement, fines, and patient perception. There is a clear unmet need for an easy-to-use solution for creating and updating emergency management plans and training materials.
The Networked Emergency Management System enables emergency managers to share emergency plans and their component parts, best practices, and training materials in a standardized format for the first time. This content is Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS), National Incident Management System (NIMS) and JCAHO compliant and can be readily customized to one's unique facility. The present invention transforms a traditional emergency management plan from a lengthy and convoluted set of text documents in a three-ring binder into an immediately accessible live process.
Existing emergency management software includes at least the following offerings:    1. Real-time systems designed to focus on broad county-level emergency response. (Examples: WebEOC® available from Emergency Services integrators, Augusta, Ga., World Wide Web.webeoc.com; E Team, available from E Team, Inc., World Wide Web.eteam.com; and Blue 292 software, available from Blue292, Inc., Durham, N.C., World Wide Web.blue292.com).    2. Real-time systems designed to provide information on emergency-room bed availability in the event of an incident. (Examples: Reddinet®, available from Reddinet, Los Angeles, Calif., World Wide Web.reddinet.com; and EMSystem®, available from EMSystem, LLC, Milwaukee, Wis., World Wide Web.emsystem.com).    3. Incident Management software designed for security professionals to document and track incidents or investigations in an emergency in order to recover the most money from federal reimbursement agencies or private insurers. (Example: IRIMS® software available from PPM 2000 Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, World Wide Web.ppm2000.com).    4. Business Continuity recovery solutions, primarily focused on corporations and their IT systems. (Examples: Software available from Symantec Corporation, Cupertino, Calif., World Wide Web.symantec.com; and Strohl Systems Group Inc., King of Prussia, Pa., World Wide Web.strohlsystems.com).    5. Learning management systems that address compliance and safety. (Examples: PureSafety, Nashville, Tenn., puresafety.com; and Blackboard Inc., Washington, D.C., World Wide Web.blackboard.com)    6. Offerings for Compliance. (Example: Compliance Suite, available from Environmental Support Solutions, Inc. (ESS), Denver, Colo., World Wide Web.ess-home.com)
The present invention is distinct from each of these in that it is a platform focused on healthcare, and it is a solution focused primarily on preparedness and mitigation rather than response or recovery.